04.18.08

Path to Extremism - A Personal Account 2: The Criteria

Posted in Extremism, Islam at 11:29 am by Haider

(To read Part 1 of this article, visit the following link: Part 1)

Searching for the Truth

When searching for the truth, I spent a great deal of thought and effort trying to understand what the criteria for knowing the truth is. I knew that the truth I was searching for should be accessible to all. Otherwise, why would I have access to this truth that no one else had access to?

Therefore, the truth can be known by all people, and the criteria to know the truth must be possessed by all. The belief in the Holy Koran, or the Bible, are not shared by everyone. At one point some people didn’t believe in these books, and then chose to believe in them. What made them take such a decision? They must have used something in order to conclude that the Holy Koran is the truth, for example. If it is to do with the miracles the Prophet performed, then these are not accessible to everyone, throughout the ages. For someone to believe in a miracle the Prophet performed, he must accept the accounts that have recorded these miracles. The accounts themselves are not proof, so how can the miracles that we have not witnessed be proof of the truth of the Holy Koran, and of Islam?

Scripture itself is not proof. We must possess a criteria by which we can determine the validity of what we read or hear. This criteria must be possessed by every human being, or should be attainable at least.

There are three elements human beings possess that I thought can be used to knowing the truth, and they have been used in the past by different people. These are:

1- Intuition
2- Emotion
3- Reason

Intuition is something that’s hard to define, or even make sense of. Is the intuition you experience God communicating with you? Or you trying to justify an act to yourself? Or Satan whispering in your soul? Besides, I thought that the truth can be communicated to others. You can use a proof to offer others that would allow them to know the truth for themselves. Intuition is an extremely personal experience that cannot be shared with others. It certainly cannot be used as proof for others. Just because I saw a vision, or think that I saw a vision, doesn’t mean that others should believe in my vision. The “sense” that I get requires interpretation, and can be formed by my own impressions of a situation, without there really being any mystical significance to these senses. I may have formed a bad impression of a person, and can now “sense” that he’s a bad guy, when he isn’t. And how can one develop his intuition or begin to know how to?

I, therefore, concluded that intuition cannot be followed as a criteria for knowing the truth.

For around a week before I reached this conclusion, I used to see the Prophet and his household (peace be on them) in my dreams, every night. But when I concluded that intuition wasn’t a means to knowing the truth, I didn’t want to use such visions as a sign for the validity of Islam. If I am to find the truth, I must use a valid criteria. I wasn’t looking for a “message from above.” I wanted to begin where others began and work my way from doubt to certainty through the right channel. I asked God not to have these visions, and I stopped having them.

Emotion is even more problematic. Emotions can have a stronger affect on us, but can be experienced for a number of reasons. One can feel a strong hatred for something because it reminds him of the truth, when he chooses not to think about it. The feeling of hatred for another race doesn’t indicate any truth about that race. It only reveals what we think about this race. Emotion is the by-product of beliefs. It doesn’t indicate whether a belief is true or false. In fact, it can stand in the way of us embracing the truth, because we do not feel like conforming to it.

Reason, on the other hand, was more predictable. Reason operates with knowledge, not with feelings. It is something we can exchange, and can be used to evaluate what others say, and to express why we disagree. We evaluate other beliefs primarily through the use of reason, coupled with the beliefs we assume to be correct. But we cannot abandon reason when trying to make sense of any belief. If the beliefs we are using are incorrect, then we can use reason to determine the contradictions that exist within them, and to gain knowledge to better understand these contradictions and how they can be resolved.

I, therefore, reached the conclusion that reason is the main criterion to knowing the truth. And since reason aims to point out contradictions, I realised that there were two forms of contradiction:

1- When a belief contradicts itself

2- When a belief contradicts reality

Reason and knowledge must be used to recognize both forms of contradiction.

And before looking into other religions or sects, I decided to ignore any religion that condemned reason or invalidated it. If reason is abandoned, what are we left with?

Destroying the Major Obstacle

Having realised that reason is my main tool for knowing the truth, I waged a campaign against my emotions, so that they will never interfere with my reasoning. I didn’t want my emotions to sway me away from the truth, and so I worked to destroy them. I wanted to get rid of all my existing emotions, and all emotional attachments that I had in order to build them up according to my new reasoning. I didn’t want emotions to stand in the way of my reasoning, but to go behind it, so that my feelings supported my reasoning, and not the other way around.

I began to detach myself from anything that I loved. I didn’t want to love the Prophet because I was brought up to love him. I had to discover something in him that all human beings can recognize to be good, and to love him for that. This attitude extended to all Islamic personalities, all beliefs, all activities. Everything. To have an emotional attachment meant that I was compromising my reasoning for my emotions. It meant that I was following my desires, rather than following the truth.

I, therefore, stopped doing things that I did because I enjoyed. I stopped eating the foods that I liked to eat, because this meant that I was following my desires. I used to be a movie lover, but I stopped watching movies, or even television. I wouldn’t even go to the living room, in order to avoid television. Boycotting television happened overnight. I remember watching the sitcom Frasier, and asking myself: “Why am I watching this when I don’t know whether I should be watching it or not?”

I walked out of the living room, and didn’t watch television shows for another 2 to 3 years.

Conditioning My Emotions

In order to rid myself of my existing emotions, I would spend a couple of hours every night visualizing myself in different situations, behaving, not in the way I think I would behave, but how I wanted to behave. If somebody criticised me, would I feel offended? I’m sure I would. In fact, as I visualized the scene, I would feel my face turning red. I would then imagine myself not feeling offended, but responding calmly, and defending myself. I practiced this visualization exercise for a number of reasons, with many different situations. How to present my ideas to others, how to control my emotions, how to improve my character, etc.

I even imagined myself following different religions, so that I wouldn’t dismiss any religion because I don’t feel comfortable in it. I would even imagine myself in a Buddhist robe, with a shaven head, walking down London streets, and tried not to feel any embarrassment as I visualized the seen. If Buddhism is right, then I shouldn’t be afraid of what following it might entail, or what ridicule I might experience.

False Criteria

Not only did I realize that emotions can come in the way of knowing the truth, but that there are many other false criteria that I can use, and people were using, to choose their beliefs. These false criteria are mentioned in the Holy Koran, and I didn’t want to follow any of them. Embracing a belief because one’s parents held the same belief, or because it is part of one’s heritage, or to blindly accept what society has blindly accepted all went against what I was pursuing: to know the truth for myself, without handing over the thinking to others.

Since I had already decided that I will not follow the beliefs of my parents, I wasn’t prone to following other people’s parents. That criterion was already dealt with. But the false criterion that I was afraid of following was society. I knew that I was susceptible to falling in this trap, and that I had to be vigilant about it.

All my decisions took two considerations into account: was I using my emotions to make the decision? Was I basing my decision on the views of society?

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